Windows 7 does not recognise PATA drive

[punahou1]

Windows 7 will only recognize my SATA drive, but will not recognize my older PATA drive. ASUS technical support is suggesting that this is a Windows 7 issue since the BIOS recognizes both dirves. Can someone please advise as to what I sould try next? Thank you so very much!

Background:
-I successfully installed the 64 bit version of Windows 7 Professional on a Western Digital SATA III drive. (My ASUS motherboard supports both SATA and PATA drives). I connected my older Western Digital PATA drive to the motherboard via the 40-1 ribbon cable.
-My BIOS correctly recognizes both drives on start-up. I have tried various combinations of slave and master jumper settings, and the only setting that allows Windows 7 to load is when the PATA drive is set to "slave" with no jumpers used on the SATA III drive.
-I've tried several Tom's Hardware forum suggestions such as confirming that the PATA drive is working on another machine, clicking on "Manage" to see if it shows up under storage and disk management, setting the PATA to master on the jumpers, and none of these have worked.

My Build:
MOBO: ASUS P7H57D-V EVO
CPU: Intel i5-760
Drives: WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 1 TB SATA III and a WD3200AAJB-00J3A0 320 GB PATA.
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

 

[Jonmor68]

Make sure you are using an 80 wire 40 pin cable and that it's fitted the correct way to the motherboard. Later PATA cables come color coded, blue end to the board, grey in the middle and black to the drive. These colors can vary, but the colered end still goes to the board.
Have a look here to see what I mean. http://www.easeus.com/resource/install-ide-hard-drive.htm

 

[punahou1]

Make sure you are using an 80 wire 40 pin cable and that it's fitted the correct way to the motherboard. Later PATA cables come color coded, blue end to the board, grey in the middle and black to the drive. These colors can vary, but the colered end still goes to the board.
Have a look here to see what I mean. http://www.easeus.com/resource/install-ide-hard-drive.htm

Thank you for the link - this is exactly how I have the drive connected to the motherboard. I'm pretty certain this is not the problem because I do see the drive in the BIOS. Its just not showing up in Windows 7...

 

[edmond419]

Has it ever worked? Try going to start menu > right click computer > manage > disk management > does it show up there? You might need to initialise it or create a partition on it.

Note that initialising can empty out the drive, plus windows 7 shows the disk as not initialised if it is formatted for mac, so if you initialise it could erase the mac data

 

[punahou1]

Has it ever worked? Try going to start menu > right click computer > manage > disk management > does it show up there? You might need to initialise it or create a partition on it.

Note that initialising can empty out the drive, plus windows 7 shows the disk as not initialised if it is formatted for mac, so if you initialise it could erase the mac data

Yes its still working - earlier today I had the PATA drive working from my old XP machine. I went to the start menu and disk management and it does not show up there (this is my main problem from the intial post above).

I've got open tickets with ASUS, Western Digital and Microsoft. Earlier this afternoon I spent a few hours with Microsoft examining my system remotely. The situation has now been escalated to their tier 2 technical support group and they will call me back tomorrow. According to the microfoft technician, they did not include PATA drivers for those who upgraded from XP 32 bit to Windows 7 64 bit (doing the clean install). Apparantly much of their emphasis was placed on those performing the Vista to Windows 7 migration. He said that this was the first time they encountered such a problem - I find it hard to believe that I'm the first to report this type of problem given the large community of XP users out there.

Thank you for your help - I'll keep you all posted on what happens next unless anyone else has ideas...

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

is the drive posting?

 

[punahou1]

is the drive posting?

Yes the drive is posting correctly. I do not get any errors on start up and when I interrupt the boot sequence to open BIOS, I can see that the motherboard has recognized both drives.

Many thanks for trying to help.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

ok let us know how it works out!

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

It's not Windows, it's your drive. The older WD IDE drives actually have three modes, Master, Slave and Single. For Single there should be no jumpers (or the jumper should be in the storage position). Try it with all the jumpers removed.

 

[punahou1]

It's not Windows, it's your drive. The older WD IDE drives actually have three modes, Master, Slave and Single. For Single there should be no jumpers (or the jumper should be in the storage position). Try it with all the jumpers removed.

Thank you so very much for the suggestion. I discovered that the older PATA WD drives have a fourth mode called "cable". (Before getting to where I am now I spent the weekend going through the ASUS, WD, Microsoft and Tom's Hardware forums and it was in the WD forum where they suggested trying all four modes). When running tests with each mode the drive was recognized every time by the ASUS BIOS. However, Windows 7 would only load when the drive was set to Slave. The other three modes caused Windows to lock-up during the boot sequence.

I'm not sure if you got my prior update - I was on-line with a Microsoft Tier 1 support technician who was remotely connected to my system. He suggested that Microsoft failed to provide PATA drivers for those who were upgrading from XP 32 bit to Windows 7 Professional 64 bit via custom clean install. Tier 2 tech support is scheduled to work with me tomorrow on this and I will post an update.

Thank you again for your suggestion - unfortunately I went down that path already

 

[punahou1]

Update: Microsoft Tier 2 support spend over 4 hours on this. We went through a number of processes outside of the OS to clean and format the PATA drive. We also deleted the standard dual channel IDE controller and then installed the optional Accusys update from Microsoft. In the end they have pointed this back to Western Digital for either a driver or firmware update.

Asus Technical support is requesting a re-installation of the OS with the PATA drive connected. The Microsoft tier 2 support rep said this would just be a waste of time after the troubleshooting we went through.

If Western Digital decides to proceed in supporting this I will provide additional updates. At this juncture they have offered to provide credit for the PATA drive (even though I have advised that it works just fine in the older XP machine).

Thank you everyone for your comments!

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

hope you get a solution!